Saturday, June 27, 2009

A traveller’s tale (part 3)

Finally the third installment of my tale. Do you know this is my first official look at Australia from the perspective of a tourist? I thought I was not a fan of travelling but this trip has certainly put new ideas in my mind.

After a few days on the road, we were back in Melbourne city with this customary city shot. The weather was largely nice–people say that it is slightly worse than Sydney’s but I do not agree.

There are plenty of interesting architecture as well as sculptures littered everywhere in the city. Melbourne is so much better a place to live in compared to Sydney (safer, cleaner, less scary, richer in culture and people seemed warmer). That was a dog-pig-like mini statue by the street I was sitting on. Notice the Chanel store? Yingying queued for an hour to buy a $3000+ bag for a friend! I simply cannot fathom why do people need those things? We went for dinner first instead of waiting with her.

We did a lot of walking around in the city.This is yet another one of our “posed” candid shots.There's something sexy about the picture that I can't put on my finger on.

Dinner at Singapore Chom Chom before watching "Angels and Demons" (a.k.a a lousy movie). They had the entire Newton Hawker Centre menu in one single restaurant and it was mighty impressive! It was a real gem-of-an-eatery as I really miss Singapore food. The rest were not very impressed though because of the price (especially Yingying). Here in close-up was my yummy dry prawn noodle with pork ribs. The soup (or should I say coloured MSG solution) was bad though.

We watched the musical “Wicked” at the Regent Theatre. It had a contrived plot as it was the prequel to Wizard of Oz and much too kiddy for my taste. Yingying fell asleep many times during the show! The ticket price included a one-course meal at a nearby restaurant with waiters who had no concept of picture-taking and forgot orders!

One of our numerous self-taken pictures (we all suffer the fate of narcissism at times, some more often than others, hehe). This was one of us taking a picture of ourselves–yes, we had a lot of time.

A capture of what I saw during the ghost train-ride that we had to take to enter the Dracula’s dinner cabaret show–a unique experience.I missed much of the joy of the ride as a result of being too pre-occupied with taking pictures, which is a very common mistake made by tourists.

$16 gone and in exchange was this picture with the cabaret cast and staff. Everyone was in character which made our time there very enjoyable.The performance was unexpectedly good too, especially that of the guy with the mop-like hair.

At the Queen Victoria Markets–a very small one compared to Paddy’s Market in Sydney (think Bugis Village in Singapore but with plenty of space to breathe). However this place was more interesting because...

...that was where I bought this venus flytrap!Its growth right now is very stunted because it is winter but I am still giving it a lot of attention as if it were an animal (my new pet).I hope the plant grows to maturity in time for it to eat up the summer files!

At the beach in St. Kilda–Ision thinks that we look like Hong Kong movie stars in this picture! I wonder who he is referring to...

We visited the Crown Casino where photo-taking inside was prohibited.As you can see, it was a very cold night but it was a very good one for BK, who won $225 and gave us a dessert treat of cakes and coffee!

The hardworking me–I completed a blog entry (the one before "A traveller's tale") during the spare time I had (while waiting for others to finish shopping at the factory outlet mall).I must work hard for my faithful blog fans!

So this concludes my tale in which I spent much quality time with my closest friends. It is like yesterday when Yingying was KNN-ing away with Meilian and I busy taking pictures of ourselves. Ah... good memories. With this tale now nicely wrapped up, these memories will forever be stored tidily in my mind, ready to be refreshed whenever I visit this blog.